Sunday, October 08, 2006

Anna Politkovskaya 1958 2006

A brave woman, in a country where serious dissent is a lot more dangerous than it is over here. I wonder how long a Pilger or Fisk would last reporting from Georgia ?

That's not to say I'm an uncritical supporter of her work. Don't know enough about it for a start, but I know in a war like the Chechen one there'll be plenty of dirtiness and atrocity on all sides. If you scour the web you can find tasteful Islamist videos of Russian soldiers being decapitated.

At the moment we hear from Afghanistan of "hundreds of Taliban killed" and the like. I'm sure that on such occasions bad things will happen, civilians will die - how can it be otherwise when any Pashtun community is a community of fighters ? but there are few to report. Our troops may be hampered by lack of numbers, equipment, helicopters, hospital beds, houses in Dachet - but they're fighting without looking over their shoulders for tomorrow's Guardian. It's too dangerous a place for Western journalists to report from.